by keith gessen i try to find a hockey game - columbia · 2021. 1. 21. · by keith gessen 34 |...
TRANSCRIPT
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I Try to Find a Hockey Game
BY KEITH GESSEN
34 | HARRIMAN
All drawings
by Julie
Winegard.
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You had to be fundamentally
stupid, I sometimes thought, to
become the sort of academic
specialist that hiring commit-
tees liked. You had to be thick
somehow. You had to block
out all the other things in the world to
focus on one narrow, particular thing.
And how, without knowing all the other
things out there, could you possibly
choose? I was enjoying this thought
one day while walking to the Coffee
Grind. It wasn’t the only time in the day
that I had to think, but it was the most
concentrated. I always walked past the
little grocery where I got my sushki and
then I was on creepy, deserted Bolshaya
Lubyanka. I had no choice but to think.
If I looked at my classmates, the ones
who started at the same time as I did,
what was the difference between them
and me? It wasn’t that they were actu-
ally stupid. Most of them were smart,
and some were quite a bit
smarter than I was.
That wasn’t
HARRIMAN | 35
FICTION
the difference, though. The difference was their willing-
ness to stick with something. The successful ones were like
pit bulls who had sunk their teeth into a topic and wouldn’t
let go until someone shot them or they had tenure.
To the ongoing frustration of my adviser, I was not doing
that. “Pretend I’m a hiring committee,” he said once. “What
is your pitch to me?”
“My pitch is that I love this stuff. I love Russian history
and literature and I love talking about it to people.”
“OK, but a university is also a place for research. What’s
your specialty?”
I had been through this with him before. “Modernity,” I
said, knowing already that he wasn’t going to like it. “I am a
specialist in modernity.”
My adviser, a six-foot-four former basketball player from
Iowa, did a very girly imitation of my voice. “‘I’m a spe-
cialist in modernity,’” he said. “‘I study the ways in which
modernity affects the Russian mind.’”
I waited for him to finish.
“I’m a specialist in my own butt!” yelled my adviser.
“That’s not what got me this job!”
“What’s wrong with modernity?”
“It covers three centuries! It’s not a specialization. Three
years is a specialization. Or better yet, three months. Three
days. If you were a specialist in, like, Tuesday through
Thursday of the first week of February 1904, but also in total
command of Russian modernism, I could get you a job
anywhere you wanted.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I mean, look at the writers you’ve studied.”
We were in my adviser’s tiny office, the two
printed-out sheets of my CV lying on his desk
between us. Despite his unorthodox advising
methods, he was a good guy. He said he’d gotten
serious about studying Russia after he realized he
wasn’t going to the NBA. (“It took me a long time
to realize that,” he said, “because I am dumb.”)
He was a great teacher, a truly inspired teacher,
but his own academic career had not gone
smoothly. He wanted me to avoid his mistakes.
“Who is Patrushkin?” he asked now, looking
at the description of my dissertation. Grigory
Patrushkin was an early-nineteenth-century
poet. He hadn’t actually written very many
poems, nor were the poems he wrote very good,
but I wanted someone from that era who wasn’t
Pushkin. Although Patrushkin knew Pushkin.
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“Patrushkin was a friend of Pushkin’s,” I now said.
“A friend?”
“He sort of knew Pushkin.”
“And does this mean you can teach Pushkin?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because there’s no course on Patrushkin!”
“I just didn’t want to write about the usual suspects. I
thought . . .” I sort of trailed off.
“Look,” he said. “Do you think I want to be studying
the architecture of early Russian huts?” In his one smart
academic move, my adviser had developed a theory that
medieval Russian huts lacked chimneys—they discovered
chimneys some two hundred years after Western Euro-
pean peasants—and this gave early Russian peasants brain
damage, which explains why they didn’t develop some
of the farming strategies that radically increased crop
yields in early modern Europe and helped bring about the
Renaissance. “Do you think I wanted to become another of
these people who come up with a monocause for Russian
backwardness? No, dude. I wanted to be Isaiah Berlin!”
“I know I’m not Isaiah Berlin.”
“I know, OK. I’m just saying. I know you love teach-
ing. That’s a good thing. But in order to teach, you need
a teaching job, yes? And right now, at this point in time,
that means finding a topic that’s going to appeal to a hiring
committee.”
Back in July he was very excited when I told him I was
going to Russia.
“This is great!” he said. “You’ll be on the ground. You can
find something new and original. Or something old.” It was
my adviser who suggested I interview my grandmother.
“She’ll tell you stories about the USSR. You can weave them
in and out of a tale of modernity. That shit is gold, my
friend. People love that shit.”
“Hiring committees love it?”
“Yes. Who did you think I meant when I said ‘people’?”
36 | HARRIMAN
Now that was out. If I couldn’t use my grandmother’s
stories, which she didn’t remember, I would have to think
of something else. But what? I really had no idea. People
like Alex Fishman made their careers repackaging Rus-
sian dictatorship. “Gulag,” said Fishman, then “internet,”
and granting institutions swooned. (He was now doing an
online history of the Gulag.) People loved reading about the
Soviet Gulag—it made them feel better about the U.S. of A.
Of course it wasn’t like Russia was now a flourishing
democracy. But it was complicated. Back in Brooklyn on
the internet, and now in my grandmother’s kitchen on
Echo of Moscow, all I heard about was what a dangerous
place Russia was, what a bloody tyrant Putin had become.
And it was, and he was. But I had half expected to be
arrested at the airport! I thought I’d be robbed on the train.
In fact the only thing I was in danger of being arrested for
was accidentally buying too many cappuccinos at the Cof-
fee Grind and not having enough cash on me to pay. (They
did not take credit cards.) The only robbery going on was
the price of croissants on Sretenka.
The country had become rich. Not everyone was
rich—my grandmother wasn’t rich, and in fact, speaking
of robbery, she had been robbed of certain things—but
overall, generally speaking, a lot of people, especially in
Moscow, were pretty well off. Looking out the window, it
was hard to square all the talk of bloody dictatorship with
all the people in expensive suits, getting into Audis, talking
on their cell phones. Was this naïve? Didn’t people in Saudi
Arabia drive fancy cars and talk on cell phones in between
chopping off the heads of dissidents? Yes. Maybe. I don’t
know. I’d never been to Saudi Arabia. For me—and not just
for me, I think—Soviet oppression and Soviet poverty had
always been inextricably intertwined.
Not everyone was happy about the new conditions. The
liberals on Echo complained about press censorship and
the marginalization of opposition politicians. Sometimes
they held small protests to express their anger at the
regime. And there were also occasional local issue-ori-
ented protests, for example against the building of a mall
in Pushkin Square. Most of these were tolerated, but some
were violently dispersed, and my grandmother had appar-
ently seen such a dispersal because every time we walked
past a larger than usual group of people—whether waiting
in line or watching a juggler perform, and especially if
there were police nearby—she would say, “Let’s get out of
here, it’s a protest, the police are very harsh toward pro-
testers,” and pull us in the opposite direction. Nonetheless
In fact the only thing I was in danger of being arrested for was accidentally buying too many cappuccinos at the Coffee Grind and not having enough cash on me to pay.”
“
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she remained very curious about the news, and every time
she found me in the kitchen with the radio on or Kommer-
sant or the Moscow Times in front of me, she started asking
questions. “What are they saying?” she’d say.
“About what?”
“You know, about the situation. What’s the situation?”
What was the situation? I couldn’t tell! It was some kind
of modern authoritarianism. Or authoritarian moderniza-
tion. Or something. I tried to keep her up on the latest, and
she gamely nodded her head.
In the meantime, the fall PMOOC sections had begun. I
was in charge of four online sections of Jeff Wilson’s class
on the classics of Russian literature. It was an OK class.
Jeff was in his midforties and taught a kind of hepped-up
version of the classics. He would say things like “Vronski is
a bro in a hipster outfit” and “Tolstoy was sort of the Kanye
of Russian literature—he was always making embarrassing
public statements and then being forced to apologize.”
The idea was to make the books relatable to a younger
audience. I didn’t mind, even though, having TA’ed for
Jeff quite a bit in grad school, I had noticed that he also
compared Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky to Kanye, to the
point where I wondered if he knew any other figures from
popular culture. (“Pushkin is really the Tupac of Russian
literature, though, don’t you think?” my adviser quipped
once, when I complained about it to him.)
The class began in early September, and so in the
Coffee Grind across from the FSB I would watch Jeff’s
lecture, skim the assigned book to refresh my memory,
and then log on to the different class blogs, where the
students wrote responses to the text and then com-
mented on those responses and then commented on
the comments—forever.
In my many years of grad school I had taught all sorts
of people. I had taught arriving freshmen in their
first semester, when they still resembled children,
their upper lips irritated from their first shaves; they
thought that Tolstoy or, better still, Dostoevsky was
trying to communicate directly to them and
responded accordingly (often
without doing the
reading). I had taught
cynical seniors who
had learned to
manipulate the
limited belief
system of
contemporary literary studies and receive good grades.
They knew that Tolstoy was just a name that we gave to
a machine that had once written symbols on a piece of
paper. It was ridiculous to try to assign some kind of inten-
tion or consistency to this machine. The seniors floated in
and out of class, making fun of me. At the end of the year,
I watched them all get jobs at hedge funds. I experienced
it as a personal failure when they left literature; the only
thing worse was when they remained. But the PMOOC stu-
dents were something else altogether—a volatile mixture of
the young and old, the overeducated and the autodidactic.
They wrote me a tremendous number of emails.
The first book we read that fall semester was Tolstoy’s
The Cossacks. It was one of Tolstoy’s early novels, about a
spoiled young officer from Moscow who is sent to do his
army service in a Cossack town on the southern Russian
frontier. Back home, the young officer has gambling debts
and a bad reputation, but in the Cossack village he starts
over again, falling in love with the simple, straightforward,
earthbound ways of the natives. He falls in love too with
a handsome, strong-boned Cossack girl named Dunya,
and though she is engaged to be married to her childhood
sweetheart, the spoiled young officer eventually convinces
her to break it off. Though skeptical, she knows she’d be
a fool to turn down a wealthy Muscovite. And then, just
as they’re about to make it official, there is a raid on the
village and Dunya’s former fiancé is killed. Somewhat
unfairly, Dunya blames the young officer for her friend’s
death. Unable to muster a defense of his actions, he packs
his things and goes back to Moscow.
The end.
The students did not like the
book, primarily because they
FICTION
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didn’t like the young officer. “Why read a book about a
jerk?” they said. After reading seven or eight responses
along these lines, I wrote an impassioned defense of The
Cossacks. Books weren’t just for likeable characters over-
coming hardships, I said. Some of the world’s greatest
books are about jerks! I wrote the post and uploaded it
and waited. The blogging software we used allowed people
to “like” posts, as on Facebook; after my heartfelt essay
received just one like, I spent an hour in the Coffee Grind
figuring out how to disable that function, and did.
At the end of my work sessions at the Grind, I would
check the Slavic jobs listings page—in early September it
was, predictably, pretty fallow—and then give myself the
dubious treat of scrolling through Facebook. Sarah hadn’t
bothered to unfriend me after our break-up and it would
have been churlish on my part to unfriend her, and now I
saw her posting solo photos of herself, looking cuter and
cuter with each one, here on some beach over Labor Day,
there on some college campus that was definitely not our
college campus . . . Her status was still “single,” and she was
alone in all the photos, and it was possible that it was just
a friend of hers who was taking them—maybe her friend
38 | HARRIMAN
Ellen?— but they didn’t feel like photos that Ellen would
take. Sarah was going into her third year in the English
department, and she had said that all the boys in English
were ridiculous, but maybe she had found one who wasn’t.
Or maybe she was dating a guy from anthro. I tried not
to think too much about it. I went back to studying the
Facebook posts of my stupid former classmates: A syllabus
completed! A manuscript accepted! An issue of the Slavic
Review with their peer-reviewed article in it! Oh, how I
hated all of them. Through gritted teeth I pressed “like” on
all their posts, pretty much without exception.
At that moment I concluded that I needed to solve this
sleep situation before it got any worse. I needed to find
some exercise. If I couldn’t jog or afford a gym, then I
would need to find a hockey game.
The next day I wrote Dima to ask if he’d found out anything
at all, and he apologized and said it was trickier than he’d
anticipated and that the only thing he’d learned was that there
was a game at Sokolniki, at the Spartak arena. He didn’t know
when or who, but maybe I could just show up there and figure
it out? It’s certainly what you’d do in America. So one day I
finally packed all my gear into a large blue Ikea bag I found in
the closet—I had, somewhat rashly and also to save on baggage
fees, thrown out my ragged old hockey bag before leaving
Brooklyn and simply stuffed my gear into my big red suit-
case—and in the evening took the metro to Sokolniki.
I reached the rink without any trouble: it was an actual
stadium, the home rink of Spartak, and unlike most build-
ings in Moscow it was neither surrounded by a tall metal
fence nor insanely and unreasonably guarded. There was
a guard at the entrance, but he saw my hockey stuff and
nodded me along. I made my way down to the ice. It was a
nice, modern, professional rink, with about five thousand
seats; I had never played on a professional rink before;
presumably Spartak was out of town or simply wasn’t using
the ice that evening, and whoever ran the rink rented it
out to earn some extra money. Very cool. Only in Russia, I
thought. For about five minutes, the country struck me as a
vast informal arrangement, outside the reach of modernity
and regimentation, an ever-evolving experiment. I liked
the place. Like I say, this feeling lasted about five minutes.
A pickup game was in progress. The level was mixed, with
a few excellent players weaving through mostly mediocre
ones. It was a little incongruous to see these middle-aged
Oh, how I hated all of them. Through gritted teeth I pressed ‘like ’ on all their posts, pretty much without exception.”
“
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nonprofessionals on a professional ice surface and on
the professional benches, in this beautiful arena, but it
was definitely a game I could play in. And there weren’t
too many guys—three on each bench, in fact, which is a
couple too few.
On one of the benches stood a guy in street clothes, like
he was a coach. He probably wasn’t a coach—I had noticed
that there were always guys like this hanging around in
Russia, without any apparent purpose, just because—but I
figured he’d know what was up.
As I walked toward him I realized that since I’d arrived I
had hardly interacted with anyone who wasn’t my grand-
mother, and I wasn’t sure in this situation whether to use
the familiar ty or the polite vy. Back in Boston my par-
ents had said vy to just about everyone except their close
friends, but the culture had moved on, and my sense was
more people now said ty. But I wasn’t sure. Vy was safer,
and I went with vy. Excuse me,” I said, using the polite
form. “Can I play with you guys?”
The pseudocoach thus politely addressed looked at me in
a neutral fashion and said, “You’ll have to ask Zhora,” then
turned back to the game.
“Excuse me,” I was forced to say again, again very
politely. “Where is Zhora?”
Zhora was on the other bench. I went over. The guy clos-
est to me on the bench was older than I was, past forty, but
in good shape and with a scar on his cheek. I asked him (vy)
if he could point out Zhora. He could. Zhora was on the ice,
a big right-handed forward who could barely keep himself
on his skates. Unlike most guys who can’t skate, however,
he was fed a constant diet of passes from his teammates
and given plenty of room by his opponents. I intuited from
this that Zhora paid for the ice.
When he came to the bench at the end of his shift I saw
that he was about my age, with smooth, almost babylike
skin and a tan. All his equipment was brand-new and he
held somewhat awkwardly a very expensive stick.
“Zhora, hello, my name is Andrei,” I said quickly. Increas-
ingly uncertain of my vy, I added, “I just moved to Moscow
and am looking for a hockey game. Do you have room?”
Zhora looked at me. I was saying vy to everyone, like a
foreigner. Instead of a proper CCM hockey bag, I had a big
Ikea bag with my stuff falling out. And I was wearing my
favorite short-sleeve, collared shirt, from some thrift store
in Massachusetts, that had a picture of a gas station and
the name “Hugo” on the chest. I either looked like a very
committed hockey player or a total idiot.
Zhora decided it was the latter.
“We’re full up,” he said.
This was patently untrue.
“Every single time?” I said. “Maybe you’re full today, but
not next time?”
“Where’d you play?” said Zhora. He used the familiar ty,
like he was my boss. I could now continue saying vy to him,
in a sign of deference, or I could also switch to ty, which
could be seen as aggressive. Or I could avoid expressions
that required a choice.
“Where did I play?” I asked, not quite
understanding.
“Yeah,” said Zhora. “For example, that
guy played at Spartak.” He pointed to the
rough-looking guy who’d helped me locate
Zhora; he had jumped over the boards when
Zhora came back to the bench and was now
skating with the puck. Spartak was effort-
lessly dodging guys half his age; he was a
tremendous hockey player.
And, to be fair, the question of
where one played was not unrea-
sonable. In hockey you don’t
want to play with people who
suck. They disrupt the flow
of the game, for one thing,
and for another, skating
on a slippery surface
and holding on to
sticks, they can be
dangerous. Zhora
himself, for
HARRIMAN | 39
FICTION
For about five minutes, the country struck me as a vast informal arrangement, outside the reach of modernity and regimentation, an ever-evolving experiment. Like I say, this feeling lasted about five minutes.”
“
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example, was such a player. So I didn’t exactly resent his
question; it’s just that there was no way for me to answer
it sensibly.
“In Boston,” I said.
Zhora chuckled. “Where in Boston?”
“In school,” I said. In Russian there is no word for high
school—all school, from first grade to tenth, is referred to as
“school”; more important, as I did not quite understand at
the time, there is no such thing as high school sports in Rus-
sia. Youth sports take place in so-called “sports schools.” They
can be affiliated with one of the major professional teams
(Red Army or Dynamo or Spartak), or they can be indepen-
dent. They train kids from a young age, sometimes for free,
encouraging those with talent and discouraging those with-
out it. Whereas my answer to Zhora made it sound like I’d
played shinny on the pond behind my elementary school.
“School, huh?” Zhora laughed again. “No, it’s all right,
we’re full up.” Then, in English: “Sorry.”
“All right,” I said, though I was pissed. At least I hadn’t
had to call him vy again. As I walked away, I watched the
game a little longer. There really were three or four terrific
players out there, but the rest of the guys were at my level
or worse. They had not played at Spartak.
My stuff felt heavy as I lugged it back to the metro, and to
add further humiliation to the previous humiliation, I got
stopped by two cops and asked for my “documents.” This
had happened to me all the time when I was younger—the
police usually stop non-Slavic-looking men, in case they’re
illegal migrants or Chechen terrorists—but it hadn’t hap-
pened to me since I’d been in town, presumably because
I had aged out of the illegal immigrant/Chechen terrorist
cohort. But my bag must have looked suspicious. I showed
them my passport, they started practicing their English but
I answered them in Russian, and then they lost interest and
rudely (ty) sent me on my way.
What the fuck was wrong with these people? In America,
at least in 2008, you didn’t have to show your documents all
the time. And you could play hockey! You showed up at a rink,
found out the schedule, put down ten dollars—maybe twenty
if you were in New York—and played hockey. That was all.
“Open hockey,” it was called, or “stick time.” Beautiful words!
As long as you had a full face mask, you could play. And here?
I had come to Moscow to take care of my grandmother and
I couldn’t even get into a hockey game. When I went to the
store to buy groceries, the cashiers were rude. The people on
the subway were pushy. The baristas at the Coffee Grind were
always smiling, but that was clearly because someone had
instructed them in Western-style customer service, and they
would lose their jobs if they cut it out.
Editor’s note: Excerpted from the chapter “I Try to Find a Hockey
Game,” from A Terrible Country, by Keith Gessen
© 2018, Viking. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Novelist, translator, and n+1 founding editor Keith Gessen
(George T. Delacorte Professor in Magazine Journalism)
has been on a roll this past year with the publication of
his essay “The Quiet Americans behind the U.S.-Russia
Imbroglio” in the New York Times Magazine, a review essay on
Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin biography in the New Yorker, capped
off with the publication of his second novel, A Terrible Coun-
try (Viking). As the standing-room-only book launch events
last summer showed only too clearly, a lot of people have
been eagerly awaiting Gessen’s next novel; many fans got a
taste when an excerpt ran in the New Yorker, along with an
interview and a recording of Gessen reading the work.
Like Gessen’s debut novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men
(2008), whose main character is named Keith, this new
novel is semiautobiographical. As he explains in a New
Yorker interview, “I love nonfiction, and I really love oral
40 | HARRIMAN
A Terrible Country: A Novel
Keith Gessen
Viking (2018)
ISBN 978-0-735-22131-4
Keith Gessen (November
16, 2018).
-
history. I like fiction that is made up, but I really love
fiction that is thinly veiled autobiography. Each form has
its rules, not even so much in terms of truth and falsity
(although nonfiction should certainly be true) but, rather,
in its pacing, its tolerance for coincidence (sometimes
greater in nonfiction than in fiction, paradoxically), and
even its tone” (April 9, 2018).
In A Terrible Country, Andrei, a newly minted Ph.D. in
Slavic studies from a university vaguely modeled on NYU,
answers the call of his older brother, Dima, to come to
Moscow and take care of their grandmother. The year is
2008 and the already slim pickings of the U.S. academic
job market have become even slimmer with the worldwide
financial crisis. Jobless and single again, Andrei seizes on
the idea of going to Moscow, interviewing his grandmother
for a possible research project, and supporting himself
by teaching online sections of his university’s PMOOC
(paid massive online open course) initiative. But none of
that works out as planned. His grandmother suffers from
dementia. She can’t remember the past and even forgets
who Andrei is. He cannot afford the expensive cappuccinos
at Coffee Grind, where he escapes to work on the PMOOC.
And to top off everything his students hate reading Tolstoy’s
The Cossacks because the main hero is a “jerk.” It is certainly
no coincidence that Tolstoy’s quasi-autobiographical work
served as Gessen’s main model for his novel.
But A Terrible Country is a book about Russia, not an aca-
demic satire. As he recounts in a double interview with his
sister, journalist Masha Gessen, “I wanted to communicate
the experience of coming to Russia and having certain
expectations from reading the news about the ‘bloody
regime,’ and then showing up and finding it doesn’t look
at all like what you expected, and the bloody regime is a
much more complicated and amorphous entity. Certainly,
in the period described in the book, 2008 to 2009, it wasn’t
dragging all that many people off in the middle of the night”
(New Yorker, March 17, 2019). During the nine years it took to
write the novel, Gessen considered moving it closer to the
present, perhaps to the year of the Bolotnoye Square pro-
tests or the Ukraine crisis, but he ultimately decided against
this because he felt that 2008–9 was “a golden moment”
and that the situation in Russia had not changed
all that much—Putin was
still in power.
Andrei’s search for
a hockey game illus-
trates the importance
HARRIMAN | 41
FICTION
of networks for making your way in Moscow—for just
about everything, including sports. Andrei has a difficult
time finding a game, even coming up with the locations
of rinks, and when he does find one it’s a bunch of mid-
dle-aged business guys who have done well in the new
Russia. They may not be Putin supporters, but they are
certainly Putin-tolerant. Andrei’s outsider status in this
crowd is quickly brushed in with his indecisiveness about
whether to use the polite or informal form of “you” (vy/
ty). He may have been born in Moscow, but he’s not a
Muscovite. He’s a Russian American.
In her appreciation of the novel for the New York Review of
Books, Francine Prose concludes: “In its breadth and depth,
its sweep, its ability to move us and to philosophize without
being boring, its capaciousness and even its embrace of the
barely plausible and excessive, A Terrible Country is a smart,
enjoyable, modern take on what we think of, admiringly, as
“the Russian novel”—in this case, a Russian novel that only
an American could have written.”
—Ronald Meyer